Great magazine designs are all great in their own ways, but crummy magazines are all the same—or at least make many of the same visual mistakes as lots of other crummy magazines. Young Money, a case in point, is dropped onto campuses every Fall in staggering quantities in the hopes of inducing students to join the In Charge Foundation, an organization that claims an interest in helping young adults learn to manage money and become intelligent consumers. Strangely, all their ads are for credit cards, and their articles are about buying things. Go figure.
Arted up with stock art and handouts, The magazine makes a few design mistakes endemic to lazily-produced publications, but most fundamentally, It’s a hodgepodge of visual ideas—you can see half-baked DNA from better glossies scattered around YM‘s pages, including a little bit of Esquire’s signature cover type, stray brackets and chevrons, stripes and boxes of various thicknesses and directions and inconsistent signage. All of this makes the magazine graphically “surprising” as you page through it but not in a good way, because all the changes are stylistic, not substantive. They serve only to undermine the publication’s identity–they don’t provide the graphic information or visual delight that the predictable imagery lacks.
While a low budget explains some of the shortcomings it can’t forgive them all—even with a paucity of resources a good designer can hit target some of the time. More probably, a disconnect between the magazine’s stated mission and the articles it seems to run contribute to the visual fuzziness. Not even the best designers can make clear design out of a mixed message.
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We appreciate the fact that you took the time to critique our magazine design. We always take these comments to heart and look to see if there’s anything useful that we can apply to improving our work.
If the comments had been confined to the magazine design, we’d just leave at that. Our concern is that you included some non-design-related assertions without sufficient research or fact-checking. We’d like to help correct a couple of misstatements.
Our parent company is the InCharge Education Foundation as you’ve stated, but the correct URL is http://www.inchargeeducationfoundation.com. The foundation is supported in part by InCharge Debt Solutions, a non-profit credit counseling organization (the url you used for the education foundation). The goal of the foundation is educational outreach across a wide spectrum of people seeking personal finance education. YOUNG MONEY Magazine is designed to serve college students and young adults in that capacity.
InCharge Debt Solutions runs an ad in the magazine, just like any of our other advertisers. It’s intended for folks who have debt problems and need some help. It’s a stretch from there to your statement that the goal of YOUNG MONEY is “inducing students to join the InCharge Foundation”. There’s really nothing to “join”. It’s just an ad on one page of the magazine.
2) You made this statement: “Strangely, all their ads are for credit cards, and their articles are about buying things.”
Neither of these is true. There are NO ads for credit cards, and none of the articles are about buying things. The closest thing is an article called “So You Want to Buy a Motorcycle” – but it’s simply about being a more savvy buyer. Even then, if you’re publishing on the subject of personal finance, “buying things” is a big part of that, and we do strive to help people make more informed decisions.
At any rate we appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight. As you’ve surmised, yes, we do have small team trying to get the most out of limited resources. But that team also shares a passion for the educational mission of YOUNG MONEY, and it can be disconcerting to see that passion reduced to hasty conclusions about motives and mission.
Have read a few of your other critiques and found numerous useful insights as to what constitutes good magazine design (and congratulations on your upcoming book!). Your comments on our design are both appreciated and well taken. Just wanted to set the record straight on some of the non-design commentary. Thanks!
I’ve clicking on the URL you provided several times over the course of the last two days. There seems to be no web site there. However, the web site I listed in my post features prominently in Young Money’s Masthead as well as the ad for the organization. There is an active InCharge Education Foundation at another URL which uses the same logo and branding as appear in the magazine and on the site I did mention. Considering the obvious interconnectedness, which is the parent and which is the child seems an academic point.
I concede that in the interest of a quick summary before moving on to the main thrust of my post, I cut a couple of corners in saying “all the ads are for credit cards and all the articles are about buying things.” But, I stand by my larger point–that Young Money‘s message of financial responsibility is mixed at best. An ad next to the masthead says, in part: “Become a youngmoney.com member and receive periodic emails about great deals on products and new promotions.” The cover features logos for several products that go after the youth market: Honda (which is actually a YM advertiser) XM, GoDaddy and Motorola to name a few. In addition to the “how to buy a motorcycle story,” there is a “Last-Minute News” piece on a price drop in DVD drives, two pieces on video games, an article on vacation travel, and an article on YouTube which features manufacturer shots of several consumer electronics products. While there are no credit card ads, there are plenty of ads for credit and big-ticket purchases such as cars–which certainly require taking out credit–and a lot of it when balancing school and living expenses. I never came to any conclusions about the motives of the organization in my original post. However, as a professor, I see students who are stressed and over-extended thanks to too many time commitments and too much debt. It seemed to me, and it still does seem to me that a magazine with Young Money‘s stated mission should be less ambiguous about whether luxuries should be had now or waited for. I would have liked to have learned more about InCharge, but found the organization’s web site fairly inexplicit about the organization’s funding and history.
Finally, I disagree that design can or should be separated from editorial content. My larger point, that Young Money‘s design is, a reflection of a mixed editorial message is not unreasonable considering the magazine’s content and nonsensical if that content is ignored.
Sorry about the URL. It should have been: http://www.inchargefoundation.org
Your comments are well articulated and well taken. You do make an excellent point that visual design and editorial approach should be viewed as a whole. Your observations about mixed messages and ambiguity are also good food for thought, and given your experience in analyzing many magazines, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how an advertiser-supported magazine like YOUNG MONEY should balance these things.
[...] which intrigued me because it made the magazine sound like a sophisticated and sincere version of Young Money, which I wrote about a while back. I used the example of YM to look at how fuzzy editorial goals [...]
[...] does for The Conservative Teen What I did for Young Money and Time [...]